New Tender Framework for Place of Worship Land
The framework could produce more predictable worship-site supply and favour adequately funded groups with genuine space needs, while shared hubs may improve scarce-land utilisation.
Place of Worship land tenders will adopt pre-qualification before price evaluation, while at least two church and two Chinese temple sites will be released annually.
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The Ministry of National Development announced today changes to the tender framework for Place of Worship (PW) land. The changes are being made to ensure that only religious groups that actively contribute to the community, and have a genuine need for worship space can bid for PW land. Tenderers must also demonstrate that they have adequate and sustainable local funding to finance the purchase and development of the PW site, and will not use foreign donations for this purpose.
To better meet Singaporeans’ religious and worship needs and ensure optimal use of Singapore’s scarce land resources, MND has worked closely with apex religious groups to review the land tender process for PW land. This has allowed for better understanding of the worship space needs of religious organisations. The apex religious groups also welcomed these efforts to ensure that new PW sites are tendered out to religious organisations with genuine space needs.
New Tender Framework
Under the previous framework, tenders for PW land were evaluated solely based on price. Under the new framework, tenderers will go through two stages – first, they will be assessed on a set of pre-qualification criteria. Only those who meet the pre-qualification criteria of this first stage will proceed to the second stage, where the site is awarded to the qualified tenderer with the highest bid price (see details in Annex A).
Supply of PW Sites
To provide sufficient land to meet religious and worship needs, MND will release at least two Church and two Chinese temple sites each year (see details in Annex B), over the next few years. This provides greater certainty to aid planning by religious organisations, and will result in more PW land supply than in the past, when sites were put out intermittently. The Government will continue to monitor the trend in PW land tenders, and adjust the supply of PW land, as necessary.
Launch of PW Hubs
For the first time, MND will also be releasing land for the development of PW hubs. PW hubs can house multiple religious organisations belonging to the same religion, in a multi-storey development. Through co-location and sharing of facilities such as car parks, Singapore’s limited land resources will be better optimised. Smaller religious organisations who find the standard PW sites too large for their use can band together under one PW hub.
MND will release sites for one Church hub and one Chinese temple hub via Concept-and-Price tenders, and religious organisations can jointly apply to develop and manage these PW hubs.
As with tenders for standalone PW sites, tenderers of PW Hubs will also have to meet the pre-qualification criteria. To ensure that the objectives of the PW hub are met, tenderers will be evaluated on their concept proposals, in particular, their experience and track record in developing and managing PW developments of similar nature, and their proposed development concepts and management plans for the PW hub (see details in Annex A). Successful tenderers of the PW hub are also expected to manage and operate the PW hub.